Israel’s conservative President speaks up for civility, and pays a price.

The One-State Reality

Israel’s conservative President speaks up for civility, and pays a price.

Talk of a two-state solution has been swallowed by despair, rage, or triumphalism.Credit Illustration by Alex Williamson / Reference: Lior Mizrahi / Getty

Reuven
(Ruvi) Rivlin, the new President of Israel, is ardently opposed to the
establishment of a Palestinian state. He is instead a proponent of
Greater Israel, one Jewish state from the Jordan River to the
Mediterranean Sea. He professes to be mystified that anyone should
object to the continued construction of Jewish settlements in the West
Bank: “It can’t be ‘occupied territory’ if the land is your own.”

Rivlin
does not have the starched personality of an ideologue, however. He
resembles a cheerfully overbearing Borscht Belt comedian who knows too
many bad jokes to tell in a single set but is determined to try. Sitting
in an office decorated with mementos of his right-wing Zionist lineage,
he unleashes a cataract of anecdotes, asides, humble bromides, corny
one-liners, and historical footnotes.
At seventy-five, he has the
florid, bulbous mug of a cartoon flatfoot, if that flatfoot were
descended from Lithuanian Talmudists and six generations of
Jerusalemites. Rivlin’s father, Yosef, was a scholar of Arabic
literature. (He translated the Koran and “The Thousand and One Nights.”)
Ruvi Rivlin’s temperament is other than scholarly. He is, in fact,
given to categorical provocations. After a visit some years ago to a
Reform synagogue in Westfield, New Jersey, he declared that the service
was “idol worship and not Judaism.”

And
yet, since Rivlin was elected President, in June, he has become
Israel’s most unlikely moralist. Rivlin—not a left-wing writer from Tel
Aviv, not an idealistic justice of the Supreme Court—has emerged as the
most prominent critic of racist rhetoric, jingoism, fundamentalism, and
sectarian violence, the highest-ranking advocate among Jewish Israelis
for the civil rights of the Palestinians both in Israel and in the
occupied territories. Last month, he told an academic conference in
Jerusalem, “It is time to honestly admit that Israel is sick, and it is
our duty to treat this illness.”

Around Rosh
Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, Rivlin made a video in which he sat next
to an eleven-year-old Palestinian Israeli boy from Jaffa who had been
bullied: the two held up cards to the camera calling for empathy,
decency, and harmony. “We are exactly the same,” one pair read. A couple
of weeks ago, Rivlin visited the Arab town of Kafr Qasim to apologize
for the massacre, in 1956, of forty-eight Palestinian workers and
children by Israeli border guards. No small part of the Palestinian
claim is that Israel must take responsibility for the Arab suffering it
has caused. Rivlin said, “I hereby swear, in my name and that of all our
descendants, that we will never act against the principle of equal
rights, and we will never try and force someone from our land.”

Every
Israeli and Palestinian understands the context of these remarks. In
recent years, anti-Arab harassment and vitriol have reached miserable
levels. The Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who treasures his
fragile ruling coalition above all else, is more apt to manipulate the
darkling mood to his political advantage than to ease it.

“I’ve
been called a ‘lying little Jew’ by my critics,” Rivlin told the
Knesset recently. “ ‘Damn your name, Arab agent,’ ‘Go be President in
Gaza,’ ‘disgusting sycophant,’ ‘rotten filth,’ ‘lowest of the low,’
‘traitor,’ ‘President of Hezbollah.’ These are just a few of the things
that have been said to me in the wake of events I’ve attended and
speeches I’ve made. I must say that I’ve been horrified by this
thuggishness that has permeated the national dialogue.”

Rivlin
is no political innocent. A former speaker of the Knesset—like
Netanyahu, he is a member of the Likud—he was a clubhouse pol, a
backslapper, a vote trader. But he was never a first-rate campaigner,
and in his long career he lost more than a few elections. His
distinguishing quality, according to an endorsement from the left-wing
daily Haaretz, is “niceness.” Niceness has never been a common
quality in the Knesset. Screaming is. So is interruption, insult,
epithet, storming out, and an occasional shove or thrown glass of water.
After years of intra-party quarrels with Rivlin, Netanyahu went to
great lengths to crush his Presidential hopes, pushing alternatives such
as Elie Wiesel, who was neither interested nor eligible, not being a
citizen of Israel. This time, however, niceness paid off for Rivlin. In
his bid to become President—a largely but not entirely ceremonial post
that is chosen by the Knesset—he won support from Arab legislators who
appreciated his courtesy, and from right-wingers like Naftali Bennett
and Danny Danon, who join him in a desire to make the West Bank a part
of Israel proper.

Despite Rivlin’s satisfaction
at achieving a lifelong goal, his mood when we met was not untroubled.
As always, he began with a long story about the Rivlin legacy—a grand
patriarch’s determination, in the eighteenth century, that his family
leave Lithuania for Jerusalem—but he was soon enveloped in the details
of what he refers to as “the tragedy we are now living in.”
“The
extremists are talking too loudly, and everyone is convinced that only
he is on the right side,” Rivlin told me in one of our conversations.
“It’s not just Jews against Arabs. It’s the Orthodox versus those who
don’t think they can keep all six hundred and thirteen commandments of
the Bible. It’s rich people versus poor people. At some point, something
came over Israel so that everyone has his own ideas—and everyone else
is an enemy. It’s a dialogue among deaf people and it is getting more
and more serious.”

Rivlin is careful to point out
enmity among Arabs as well as among Jews. Hamas, he says, is a
nightmare for the people of Gaza above all. But in his speech at the
Jerusalem conference he made it plain that he was talking mainly about
his own tribe. He despairs of hate speech on the Internet, of
politicians and prominent rabbis condoning anti-Arab violence and
rhetoric. “I’m not asking if we’ve forgotten how to be Jewish,” he said,
“but if we’ve forgotten how to be human.”

Israeli
politicians often speak of the country’s singularity as “the sole
democracy in the Middle East,” “the villa in the jungle.” They engage
far less often with the challenges to democratic practice in Israel: the
resurgence of hate speech; attacks by settlers on Palestinians and
their property in the West Bank; the Knesset’s attempts to rein in
left-wing human-rights organizations; and, most of all, the unequal
status of Israeli Palestinians and the utter lack of civil rights for
the Palestinians in the West Bank. A recent poll revealed that a third
of Israelis think that Arab citizens of Israel—the nearly two million
Arabs living in Israel proper, not the West Bank—should not have the
right to vote.

The reasons for the curdled
atmosphere are many: the persistence of occupation; the memory of those
lost and wounded in war and terror attacks; the Palestinian leadership’s
failure to embrace land-for-peace offers from Ehud Barak, in 2000, and
Ehud Olmert, in 2008; the chaos in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon; the
instability of a neighboring ally like Jordan; the bitter rivalries with
Turkey and Qatar; the regional clash between Sunni and Shia; the
threats from Hezbollah, in Lebanon, from Hamas, in Gaza, and from other,
more distant groups, like ISIS, hostile to the existence
of Israel; the rise of anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic sentiment in
Europe and its persistence in the Arab world; a growing sense of drift
from the Obama Administration. All these developments have pushed the
country toward a state of fearful embattlement. The old voices of the
left, the “pro-peace camp,” have too few answers, too few troops. And so
Netanyahu, the champion of a status quo that favors settlers and the
Likud, retains his perch. His strategic vision seems to be a desire to
get from Shabbat to Shabbat. He has been Prime Minister longer than any
of his predecessors except David Ben-Gurion.
During
the Gaza war this summer, as the death toll reached twenty-one hundred
Palestinians and seventy-one Israelis, and leaders around the world
expressed indignation at the scale of the Israeli response to the Gaza
rockets, nearly all the rallies in the country were pro-war, shows of
national solidarity with the families of the Israeli dead, with the
Israel Defense Forces. Some rising young ideologues in the Likud
assailed Netanyahu as indecisive, weak, unwilling to “go all the way.”

Expressing
doubts about the proportionality of response, even documenting the
human consequences of that response, was, in this charged atmosphere,
taken as deeply suspect. The images of carnage and destruction in Gaza
that were so common around the world were rare on Israeli television or
in mainstream dailies like Yedioth Ahronoth, where the emphasis
was on rockets, tunnels, and honoring the I.D.F. When Yonit Levi, the
lead anchor of the Channel 2 evening news, delivered straightforward
reports about deaths and casualties in Gaza, she was rewarded with a
Facebook page on which thousands of people demanded that she be removed
from the airwaves, and text messages that were so threatening the police
had to get involved.

Meanwhile, right-wing
groups came to workplaces in Israeli cities that were known to employ
Arabs and denounced them and the owners. Palestinians in Jerusalem told
me they were afraid to take public transportation, to visit markets and
malls. “This has been the most dehumanizing ordeal in my experience,”
Diana Buttu, a lawyer and former legal adviser for the Palestine
Liberation Organization, told me. “All you hear about is the idea that
Palestinians ‘don’t value human life,’ ‘they have a culture of
martyrdom,’ ‘they use their children and women as human shields.’ The
idea is not that Israel is doing this but that we are doing this to
ourselves. ”
One morning during the war, before I went to call on Rivlin at the Presidential residence, I was reading Haaretz
at Caffit, a café in the German Colony of Jerusalem. Shin Bet, the
Israeli security service, was still hunting for the Hamas operatives who
in June had kidnapped and killed three Israeli teen-agers—Eyal Yifrach,
Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Frankel. The crime had outraged the nation.
Shin Bet had in custody a twenty-nine-year-old settler named Yosef Haim
Ben-David, who was a suspect in the retaliatory murder of a Palestinian
teen-ager named Mohammed Abu Khdeir. Police had found Abu Khdeir’s body
in the Jerusalem Forest; he had been bludgeoned and burned to death.
Ben-David, the owner of an eyewear shop who lived in a West Bank
settlement called Geva Binyamin, told the police that he and two friends
were so enraged by the murder of the three Israelis that on the day of
the funeral they wanted to “harass an Arab or vandalize property or beat
somebody up, nothing specific.”
Ben-David
and his friends stopped at a station to fill bottles with gasoline. As
he told his interrogators, “We were hot and angry, and decided we’d burn
something of the Arabs’.” At first, they looked for an Arab shop to
burn. “Then we talked and decided to take it up a notch,” he went on.
“We said, ‘They took three of ours, let’s take one of theirs.’ And we
decided to pick someone up, to kidnap him, beat him up, and throw him
out.”

The friends drove to the neighborhood of Shuafat. It was after 3 a.m.,
but it was Ramadan, and many Arabs were out on the streets well before
the morning meal. Ben-David and the others spotted a skinny
sixteen-year-old boy along a main road: Abu Khdeir. He was studying at a
vocational school to be an electrician. Two of the Israelis got out of
the car and asked for directions to Tel Aviv. Abu Khdeir did not speak
Hebrew well; they closed in on the boy, and shoved him in. One of the
Israelis started to choke him. Ben-David yelled, “Finish him off!”

“He started to gurgle,” Ben-David told the police. “At some point he stopped struggling.”

They
drove to the Jerusalem Forest, and then Ben-David hit Abu Khdeir
repeatedly in the head with a crowbar. Finally, the men dragged him out
of the car, and as Ben-David rained blows on him he shouted, “This is
for Eyal, and this is for Naftali . . .” Then they poured gasoline over
Abu Khdeir and set him on fire. The postmortem determined that Abu
Khdeir was still alive as he burned.

The Israelis
then drove to a nearby park. Ben-David confessed that they began to
feel remorse. “I was in shock,” he told the interrogators. “We’re Jews,
we have a heart. Afterward we talked about it and . . . each one poured
his heart out and we regretted doing it. I told them . . . ‘This is not
for us. We erred, we’re compassionate Jews, we’re human beings.’ Then we
got depressed.”

This spirit of rage and
resentment is, as Rivlin observes, no longer confined to the outer
fringe. In the mid-eighties, Meir Kahane, a Brooklyn-born rabbi who led
both the Jewish Defense League in the United States and the Kach Party
in Israel, won a seat in the Knesset. Kahane trafficked in baldly
xenophobic rhetoric, but, by 1988, Kach had been banned by the Knesset
as a racist party and barred from most media outlets. Today, the
mainstream right-wing party Likud has moved so much farther to the right
that its old “princes,” such as Benny Begin and Dan Meridor, who had
been opponents of a Palestinian state but advocates of democratic norms,
were voted out of the leadership in 2012. The Party’s dominant young
voices include hard-liners like Danny Danon, who, as deputy defense
minister, disparaged the Gaza operation as “feeble”; another Likud
legislator, Moshe Feiglin, has called himself a “proud homophobe” and
has vowed to build a Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount and “fulfill our
purpose in this land.” Netanyahu’s principal coalition partner, Avigdor
Lieberman, has demanded that Israeli Arabs take loyalty oaths. Naftali
Bennett, the leader of Jewish Home, a settler-dominated party, speaks of
at least a partial annexation of the West Bank.

“There’s
been a sea change in Israel,” Bennett told me recently, with distinct
satisfaction. “Something dramatic happened with Gaza. People realize now
that the whole notion of a Palestinian state, of handing over land to
another Arab entity, won’t work. Nine years ago, we pulled out of Gaza
and took out all the Jews. The result is that Gaza became Hamastan, a
fortress of terror. As much as we wanted to separate, terror has a way
of running after you.” Bennett hopes to succeed Netanyahu as Prime
Minister.
More
explicitly jingoistic and racist elements now operate closer to the
center of Israeli political life. Some well-known figures in the
religious world speak openly in an anti-democratic rhetoric of Jewish
supremacy—“strength and victimhood all melded together,” as one Israeli
friend put it to me. (When a group of rabbis told their followers not to
rent property to Arabs, Rivlin called the edict “another nail in the
coffin of Israeli democracy.”) Yoav Eliasi, a rapper who calls himself
HaTzel (the Shadow), led a group of fellow-fanatics who broke up a peace
demonstration in Tel Aviv. One of the groups that accompanied the
Shadow was Lehava (Flame), an association of religious extremists who
see it as their mission to battle assimilation. Lehava tries to break up
weddings between Muslims and Jews. Similar groups comb through Facebook
looking for left-wing sentiment among Israeli Jews; when they find it,
they send letters to their employers demanding that the lefties be
fired.

Assaf Sharon, a young liberal activist
and academic who went to a yeshiva in a religious Zionist settlement,
told me that a few years ago he had helped stage a demonstration after
settlers attacked Palestinians near Jerusalem. As soon as the small
rally began, a group of young right-wing thugs were all over them. “We
were thirty, they were seventy, and they had chains and knives and
sticks,” Sharon said. “I had my nose broken. Some had limbs broken. The
police were there, but there were no prosecutions. Now these same guys
come to Tel Aviv, to Haifa. They are very hot-tempered, excited
hooligans, and it is all anti-Arab. Their slogan is ‘A Jew Is a Blessed
Soul, an Arab Is a Son of a Whore.’ ”

When
Rivlin was the speaker of the Knesset, he tried time and again to quash
legislation that he felt was discriminatory and anti-democratic,
including a measure designed to prevent the boycotting of any Israeli
institution or commercial product. “Woe betide the Jewish democratic
state that turns freedom of expression into a civil offense,” he wrote
in Haaretz at the time. The law “threatens to catapult us into
an era in which gagging people becomes accepted legal practice.” As the
speaker of parliament, he repeatedly defended the rights of Arab
legislators who had been shouted down and threatened with expulsion.
When one Arab member, Haneen Zoabi, was attacked in the Knesset as a
“traitor” for participating in the flotilla from Turkey protesting the
Israeli blockade of Gaza, Rivlin demanded that she and her allies be
allowed to speak “even if what they say hurts me.”

Last
year, Rivlin denounced fans of Beitar Jerusalem, the soccer team of the
city’s right wing, after they held up signs reading “Beitar Forever
Pure” to protest the signing of two Muslim players from Chechnya.
Rivlin, a Beitar supporter, said at the time, “Imagine the outcry if
groups in England or Germany said that Jews could not play for them.”

Had
a Jewish left-wing critic made the sort of statements that Rivlin has,
he would not wait long before being denounced as a “self-hater.” A
non-Jew could expect to be branded anti-Semitic. Because of his
conservative bona fides, Rivlin cannot easily be dismissed. “Rivlin may
turn out to be the most influential President in Israeli history,”
Avishai Margalit, a liberal philosopher and a founder of Peace Now, told
me. “He is a true believer but genuinely non-racist, not merely
tolerant. He has sincere respect for the Arabs, which is so rare in so
many circles. Of course, as the Russian adage goes, Influence moves like
the knight in chess—forward and then to the side, never in a straight
line.
So we’ll have to wait to see what impact Rivlin really has.”

Rivlin’s
central allegiance is to the career and thought of Vladimir (Ze’ev)
Jabotinsky, who was the patriarch of the Revisionists, the most militant
and militarist stream of early Zionism. Unlike the leaders of
mainstream Labor Zionism, Jabotinsky recognized the deep, irreconcilable
interests of the Arab presence in Palestine. Insisting on the
superiority of the Jewish claim on the land, he foresaw the
inevitability of confrontation: “Every native population in the world
resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to
rid itself of the danger of being colonized,” he wrote in his 1923 essay
“The Iron Wall.” “That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and
what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary
spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of
‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel.’ ”
This
is where Ruvi Rivlin’s legacy becomes more complex. Although Jabotinsky
considered himself a liberal and a democrat, his nationalism was so
fierce that he occasionally betrayed an admiration for Benito Mussolini.
Rivlin is no doubt sincere when he says that he would give Arabs full
civil rights in a Greater Israel, but he can be viewed as the more
benign face of a right-wing one-state ideology. Others on the right who
talk of one state want mainly to sanctify the annexing, in some form, of
occupied territory. As Margalit puts it, “The rest really believe in
apartheid in the West Bank. They believe in full surveillance, full
dominion, something resembling a Stasi state as in that film ‘The Lives
of Others.’ ”“A man can’t fully enjoy golf until he has a family of his own to avoid.”Buy or license »

The
one-state/two-state debate is highly fraught not least because of
proximity. Too much history, too little land. This is not India and
Pakistan; the map of Ireland is a veritable continent compared with
Israel and the Palestinian territories. Gaza is about as close to
Herzliya as Concord is to Hanover; the West Bank, as Israelis are quick
to point out, is seven miles from Ben Gurion Airport. Any two-state
solution with a chance of working would have to include federal
arrangements not only about security but also about water, cell-phone
coverage, sewage, and countless other details of a common
infrastructure. Talk of a one-state solution, limited as it is, will
never be serious if it is an attempt to mask annexation, expulsion, or
population transfer, on one side, or the eradication of an existing
nation, on the other. Israel exists; the Palestinian people exist.
Neither is provisional. Within these territorial confines, two
nationally distinct groups, who are divided by language, culture, and
history, cannot live wholly apart or wholly together.

To
most Israelis and many Palestinians, a one-state solution is no
solution at all. It seems like the by-product of left-leaning
desperation or right-leaning triumphalism. Even many of those who know
that a two-state peace settlement is far from imminent believe that a
binational state represents not a promise of democracy and coexistence
but a blueprint for sectarian strife—Lebanon in the eighties, Yugoslavia
in the nineties. And yet the idea has a rich history.

Many
of the early Zionists either failed to recognize the Arab population in
what they regarded as their future homeland or willfully ignored it.
Others made a Realpolitik assessment about the urgent need for a refuge
from European anti-Semitism, in the wake of the Dreyfus affair and
pogroms in the Russian Empire. In effect, many of those early Zionists
adopted the illusions of Mark Twain, who, when visiting Palestine in
1867, saw only “a silent, mournful expanse,” and those of the Earl of
Shaftesbury, who spoke about “a land without a people for a people
without a land.”

David Ben-Gurion, Chaim
Weizmann, and the other leaders of mainstream Zionism failed to reckon
with the Arabs directly in their field of vision. One Zionist faction
that did recognize the dilemma was the Revisionists, led by Jabotinsky,
who was born in Odessa and had a reputation as a poet, playwright,
novelist, and electrifying polemicist. “The tragedy is that there is a
clash here between two truths; but the justice of our cause is greater,”
he argued in 1926.

On today’s right, the
one-state vision encompasses greater Jerusalem and the West Bank but
discounts Gaza, not least for demographic reasons. Who wants to deal
with poor, furious Gaza, to say nothing of its million-plus population?
Besides, Gaza, unlike the West Bank, is not rich with Biblically
resonant cities and sites.
Caroline Glick, who is a columnist for the Jerusalem Post,
a conservative English-language daily, and was a member of the Israeli
negotiating team from 1994 to 1996, recently published “The Israeli
Solution: A One State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.” Glick is not
prone to equivocation. Her columns and Facebook page make her views
plain: “The Death of Klinghoffer” is “anti-Semitic smut,” an “operatic
pogrom.” The Obama Administration wants to “screw the Jews in Israel.”
She is a voice from the part of the population that sees a peace deal as
impossible and Israel as noble and friendless, destined to go it alone
in a treacherous world.

“We don’t have anything
to talk about with the Palestinians,” Glick told me over lunch in
Jerusalem. “There was never anything to talk about. . . . We have been
trying to do this since 1993. It’s lunatic, trying to pretend away
reality in order to reach a deal attractive on prime-time television. In
the messiest political situation ever. It’s stupid. It’s childish. I
want to incorporate Judea and Samaria into Israel. I want to be done
with this nonsense.”
Glick
grew up in Hyde Park, Obama’s old neighborhood on the South Side of
Chicago. She immigrated to Israel in 1991. Like many Israelis, she finds
the moralizing of foreigners oppressive. “It’s evil to concentrate on
Israel,” she said. “I am not saying we are pure as the driven snow—you
can’t be if you are a sovereign nation—but there is no rational way of
explaining that obsession, that unswerving gaze, that desire to spend
billions of dollars to stigmatize our country and leaders. There is an
unhealthy obsession with Jews and power. People coming in and committing
these slanders are the ones responsible for the deaths of those
Palestinians. They encourage Hamas to do this.”

Like
Netanyahu, Glick sees a Palestinian state as little more than a staging
ground for assaults on Israel. “The border will be permeable,” she
said. “Jerusalem will be divided and people will walk in the Damascus
Gate and then through the Jaffa Gate and murder people. There is no way
of securing the country. If you look at what’s happening in Syria and
Iraq and everywhere else, people like Abbas”—Mahmoud Abbas, the
President of the Palestinian Authority—“would share the fate of Qaddafi.
His corrupt sons would all be shot by a firing squad, and we would have
a situation where we would be facing a jihadist enclave in the middle
of Israel.”

The left-wing
version of a one-state, or binationalist, idea emerged at around the
same time as Jabotinsky’s version, when a small collection of left-wing
intellectuals, many centered at the Hebrew University, insisted that the
ethical principles of Zionism demanded ethical behavior toward the
Arabs. The group, called Brit Shalom (Covenant of Peace), supported the
idea of shared political power in Palestine. Its members were deeply
influenced by Ahad Ha’am, an early Zionist thinker and essayist who
emphasized a cultural-spiritual revival in Palestine rather than a
majority-Jewish state. In his travels to Palestine, Ahad Ha’am warned
that if the Zionists failed to act justly toward the Arabs there would
be trouble: “The natives are not just going to step aside so easily.”
Decades later, Martin Buber, a philosopher and leader of Brit Shalom,
warned of excessive nationalism in Zionist thought and counselled
against the creation of a “tiny state of Jews, completely militarized
and unsustainable.”

The idea of two states for
two peoples came together in official form in 1936, when Lord Peel was
charged by the British Mandate with investigating unrest between Arabs
and Jews. His commission set out the initial boundaries of partition. By
the time the United Nations voted in support of partition, in 1947, the
binational idea, and its array of supporting factions, including Brit
Shalom, had dissolved. The surrounding Arab states rejected partition
and invaded the new state of Israel, which emerged victorious.

The
reappearance of a one-state discussion in Israel came out of
frustration over the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank following the
Six-Day War and the failures to gain an agreement with the Palestinians.
Meron Benvenisti, who was the deputy mayor of Jerusalem from 1971 to
1978, years when Israel kept expanding the city, spoke out against the
occupation of lands won in the 1967 war and what he saw as Israel’s
broader intentions. By the early eighties, he concluded that the leaders
of both Labor and Likud were complicit in the ever-widening
construction of settlements throughout the territories and were making
it impossible to lay any groundwork for Palestinian independence.

Benvenisti established an organization to study the situation in the
West Bank, and, in a book of essays published in 1989 called “The
Shepherd’s War,” he warned that the occupation was becoming
“irreversible.” The settlers, including the most bourgeois,
state-subsidized suburbanites, had coöpted the language and spirit of
the kibbutzim of the early state; the settlers were the new pioneers.
Benvenisti derided the term “occupied territories,” because it assumed a
temporary passage of history; it promoted a comforting notion about
“when peace comes.” In the meantime, he saw that the Palestinians—in the
West Bank, in Jerusalem, in Gaza, in Israel, in the refugee camps
abroad, and in the diaspora—were thoroughly splintered in their
day-to-day aspirations, their political leaderships, and their
identities.

“What Israel did, through the logic
of an occupier, was to divide and rule—so much so that the British would
have been green with envy the way the Israelis have succeeded,”
Benvenisti told me one evening in East Jerusalem. The settlements are so
established, he said, that even if, magically, an Israeli and
Palestinian agreement based on the 1967 borders could emerge, it would
swiftly collapse. “A Palestinian state based on such a plan is going to
be a collection of Bantustans,” he said, echoing the view of many
leading Palestinian thinkers and politicians. “It’s not going to be
viable. The irredentist urges, if they are squeezed and suffocated by
Israel, will rise up again.”

Benvenisti
is no less brutal about liberal Zionists. “They have these
demonstrations against the ‘fascistization’ of Israel,” he said. “A
Palestinian Arab listening to them crying now would laugh. They know
that the two-state solution is in itself racist.”

We
talked for a while about David Grossman, one of Israel’s best novelists
and a leading voice against the settlements and occupation. Benvenisti
shrugged. For him, Grossman’s tribe of liberal Zionists is deluded. “All
your enmity and anger is directed at the settlers,” he said. “But what
is your role as an Israeli in perpetuating it and benefitting from it?
Grossman says that occupation is the source of all evil. This is not
true. The problem is the privileged condition of the Jewish ethnic group
over the others, those defined as the ‘enemies,’ the ‘terrorists.’ You
divert attention, so that it is easier to define, and you restrict your
anger and fight a battle that to me is irrelevant. For the Israeli left,
it is important that the game [of negotiations] goes on because it
soothes their consciences. They are serious people. But they are serious
in trying to salvage the Zionist creed. They need to remain Zionists,
and for them the definition of Zionism is a Jewish state. They insist on
seeing the beginning of the conflict in 1967. They can’t cope with
1948.”

I asked Benvenisti how his vision of one
state would work. “Sometimes it is enough to be a diagnostician,” he
said. “When you get into prescriptions, people tend to dismiss the
diagnosis.”

My conversation
with Benvenisti took place on a late-summer night in the courtyard of
the American Colony, a beautiful old hotel in East Jerusalem. The next
morning, as if to underline the excruciating proximities of the
conflict, I crossed the street and called on Sari Nusseibeh, a professor
of Islamic philosophy who was the longtime president of Al-Quds
University and once an adviser—a particularly moderate adviser—to Yasir
Arafat. Nusseibeh comes from one of the grandest of Palestinian
families. His relatives hold the keys to the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre. He has always been overmatched by the fiercer voices around
him. Now he appeared to have come very close to giving up.

On
a broiling day, we sat in his cool anteroom drinking tea with his wife
and daughter. “The classical two-state solution is exhausted,” he said.
“I’d like it to be working, but I don’t see it working. The wheels of
history are grinding much faster than our ability to think or our
ability to impose our ideas on history.”

Nusseibeh
did not give in easily to defeatism. His liberalism, his alliances over
the years with like-minded Israelis—a decade ago, he sketched out a
peace agreement with Ami Ayalon, a former chief of Shin Bet—never made
him popular in the Palestinian resistance. But, with the collapse of
John Kerry’s recent attempt to forge an agreement, the Israeli and the
Palestinian leaderships had proved, yet again, utterly unable to
advance; Hamas, despite its weakness, had regained a place in the center
of the Palestinian consciousness; and the entire region was inflamed,
which was a pretext for Israel to stand pat. And so Nusseibeh has
switched his focus from two states to something more limited and basic:
the civil rights of Palestinian Arabs both in the occupied territories
and in Israel proper.

When I mentioned that I had
seen Meron Benvenisti the previous evening and that he had given up on a
two-state solution more than thirty years ago, Nusseibeh replied, “In
the eighties, Meron was already telling us that the settlements were
developing in a way that was irreversible. We thought Meron was an
Israeli agent trying to dissuade us from a Palestinian state! But then
we began to see the new geography, the infrastructure of roads and
roadblocks and checkpoints that was being built. It all became
tangible.”

Nusseibeh was also hard on his own
leadership. “In the eighties, the idea of a Palestinian state seemed
beautiful,” he said. “It would be free and equal, with no occupation.
Today, not as many people are enthused about it. People are disappointed
by our failures—our internal failures, too. We used to think we would
be the best and most democratic state in the Arab world, but now we are
like the worst state in Africa. The older generation failed to translate
the idea into reality.”

The instability
throughout the region, meanwhile, conspires against any Israeli leap of
faith. “The Arab world, the Muslim world, seems to be falling apart,”
Nusseibeh said. “I grew up thinking there was something solid in the
Arab world except for the Palestinian situation. Now all of these
governments have failed. My generation grew up thinking that Muslims
were tolerant. Now it’s scary, something totally different, a monster
growing up all around you. Somehow it is less dangerous for the
Palestinians here. It’s safer for people here than in the Arab world, if
you take Gaza away. Under occupation, your land and your resources are
taken, there are no rights, but we generally don’t live in fear.”

In
the West, the one-state idea has been boosted over the years by
academics such as Edward Said, Tony Judt, John Mearsheimer, and Virginia
Tilley, and by activists such as Ali Abunimah, the Palestinian-American
co-founder of a Web site called Electronic Intifada. In Palestine,
polls differ radically, but nearly a half century of occupation and a
crushing sense that a one-state reality is effectively the status quo
have pushed more people to support binationalism. Ahmed Qurei, a central
player in the Oslo process, is among the Palestinian politicians who
have given up on a two-state solution.

One
night, I went to Ramallah to call on Husam Zomlot, a high-ranking
adviser in the Abbas government. Zomlot’s father was born in a village
near Ashkelon and, as a toddler, fled in 1948 to Gaza. The family
thought that they would be able to return home. They were among hundreds
of thousands of refugees who could not. Zomlot’s father became a
successful textile manufacturer, but, during the conflict in 2006 over
the kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, the I.D.F. bulldozed his
factory. He went abroad and watched the bombing of Gaza on television.
“He sits in London watching his grandchildren going through the same
experience that he went through as a refugee,” Zomlot said.
When
I asked Zomlot about a one-state solution, he laughed. Zomlot would
love to commute from Ramallah to Haifa and teach—“and live like a human
being”—but conceded that such a commute is beyond discussion, a fantasy.
“There is only one government that controls this state now, and it has a
plan to colonize the rest of historic Palestine,” he said. “This is not
a racial dispute, it’s not sectarian like in Iraq, and it is not
straightforward occupation like America in Afghanistan. It’s a
displacement and a replacement exercise. This is what we live every day.
On a mass scale sometimes and gradually at other times, like now, but
it has never stopped since 1948.

“For the last
forty-seven years, there’s been an international consensus about a
two-state solution,” he went on. “So how do you throw that away? Can
you? Why would I as a Palestinian want to compromise my nationality—and
heritage and identity and distinctiveness—and then create a hybrid
identity when I see the fate of the Palestinians in Israel? Look at
their fate. Look at them in recent weeks. Sacked from workplaces.
Verbally assaulted. In their own state! When the Israeli foreign
minister”—Avigdor Lieberman—“comes out and says, ‘I want to get rid of
these people, through transfer, or exchange,’ excuse me, do I want
willingly to live under such a culture and mind-set and state? No, I
don’t. There is no glimpse of hope of being an equal citizen under such
an ideology. Israel has not moved to the right. It has gone to a
madhouse! Why would I want to serve an Israeli flag or vote for the
Knesset or serve in the Israeli Army?”

One
evening, I met with Rivlin’s predecessor, Shimon Peres, who, at
ninety-one, presides at a peace center named for him in Jaffa. Peres,
who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the Oslo process, now sees
his life’s work receding into impossibility. His frustration is
deepened by Netanyahu’s contempt for the Palestinian leader, Abbas, and
by the chilly relations between the Israelis and the Obama
Administration. Peres has always been a smooth operator, selling
optimism door to door in Western capitals, but he seemed to have nothing
in his sample case. Still, he rejected Rivlin’s alternative. “One state
is nonsense,” he told me, adding, “Czechoslovakia had a divorce and
they were better off.”

The Palestinians are well
aware that no Israeli government would consider a binational
alternative in which they were in the majority. The history of Jews
living as a minority in Arab states is not a pretty one. Edward Said,
when he was asked in 2000 by a writer from Haaretz what would
happen to a Jewish minority in a binational state, replied, “It worries
me a great deal. The question of what is going to be the fate of the
Jews is very difficult for me. I really don’t know.” What persists is
the one-state reality, the status quo, and, with it, the corrosive
rhetoric and behavior that has turned Ruvi Rivlin into an unexpected
prophet.
Toward
the end of the recent war, I went to a peace demonstration on Rabin
Square, in Tel Aviv. This is where Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot
to death, in 1995, by Yigal Amir, a religious-nationalist fanatic.
Several years after the killing, Amir told his mother, from prison, that
had he not murdered Rabin “there would have been a Palestinian state
for a while already, no Jewish settlements, we would have lost
everything.” The demonstrators carried signs in favor of peace. David
Grossman made a speech. But it was a small and listless affair.

“In
the nineties, I thought our problem would be solved before South
Africa’s,” Peres had told me. “There were economic sanctions, but what
really brought down the Afrikaners was the sense of isolation. Suddenly,
they had nowhere to go.” Peres, of course, opposes any boycott of
Israel, but his concern was clear. Many Israeli friends have remarked on
the élite in the country—doctors, artists, engineers, businesspeople;
call it two hundred thousand people—who provide Israel with its economic
and cultural vibrancy. That élite is no less patriotic than the rest,
but if its members begin to see a narrowing horizon for their children,
if they sense their businesses shrinking, if they sense an Israel deeply
diminished in the eyes of Europe and the United States, they will head
elsewhere, or their children will. Not all at once, and not everyone,
but there is no denying that one cost of occupation is isolation.

In
the meantime, Ruvi Rivlin is paying another kind of cost. Following his
trip to Kafr Qasim, members of the resentful right have circulated on
social media and various Web sites a Photoshopped picture of him wearing
a red kaffiyeh. This brand of vitriol is reminiscent of the days, two
decades ago, when fanatics demonstrating against the Oslo peace accords
brandished pictures of Yitzhak Rabin wearing a kaffiyeh or a Nazi S.S.
uniform—the sort of images that appealed to his assassin. Last week, at a
service commemorating the nineteenth anniversary of Rabin’s death,
Rivlin, who opposed the accords, gave a speech celebrating Rabin’s
courage and leadership. Dalia Rabin-Pelossof, his daughter, and a former
member of the Knesset, called on Netanyahu to condemn the harassment of
Rivlin. Then she turned to Rivlin and said, “It is true you did not
come from the same background, and we do not share the same political
views. But we have always been members of the same sect, for whom the
rules of democracy are sacred and from which we may not deviate under
any circumstances.” ♦

David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992.